With the explosion of information available today, it has become critical for organizations to carefully manage their information to meet organizational objectives. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are integrated information systems that have been developed to serve a variety of departments within an enterprise, e.g., corporation, to make effective use of its information. ERP systems evolved out of the manufacturing industry. Generally, ERP systems use packaged software rather than proprietary software written by or for one customer. ERP modules may be able to interface with an organization's own software with varying degrees of effort, and, depending on the vendor, ERP software may be alterable via programming.
ERP systems typically include software that manages information for use in manufacturing, order entry, accounts receivable and payable, general ledger, purchasing, warehousing, transportation and human resources. ERP systems are commercially available from companies such as SAP, PeopleSoft™, Oracle™, Baan™, J.D. Edwards™, and others.
One problem with ERP systems is loading or interfacing the ERP systems with data from existing systems, so-called “legacy data.” For purposes of this specification, the terms “loading” and “interfacing” are used interchangeably to refer to providing data from a non-ERP system or data source to an ERP system. Conventionally, legacy data is provided to the ERP system through a custom-built interface. Taking SAP's R/3 ERP system as an example, the following steps are typically used to provide legacy data to the ERP system:                1. Determine the on-line transaction needed to load/update/delete the data in the ERP system.        2. Manually execute the screens for the transaction, writing down each screen and field name that is populated, as well as what buttons are pushed to navigate through the screens.        3. Design a fixed-format file layout for the legacy data.        4. Write a program to extract the legacy data from the legacy system using the file layout to format the data.        5. Write an SAP Batch Data Conversion (BDC) program to read data from the file extracted from the legacy system, and, using the data collected in (2) above, write a program in “ABAP” code—a specialized language for SAP's ERP system—to execute each screen, populate each field, and execute the navigation in the correct sequence.        6. Create test data using the file layout from (3) above.        7. Test the SAP BDC program to make sure it works properly, and that all fields and screens contain the correct data.        8. Execute the program generated in (4) above.        9. Redo (7) using the data from (8).        10. Once all debugging is complete, use SAP “transports” to move the SAP BDC program into a production mode.        11. Execute the SAP BDC program against the live production of the SAP system.This process is time consuming and requires the expertise of a number of different people. For example, an SAP business analyst or end user gathers the information on the particular screens needed to get the data into the ERP system and to execute the final SAP BDC program. A programmer familiar with SAP BDC and ABAP programming language creates and tests the SAP BDC program. A programmer or analyst familiar with a programming language such as COBOL or C++ creates code to extract the data from the legacy system. Finally, an SAP BASIS transport specialist moves the SAP BDC program into production mode. At each point in this process, misunderstanding between each of these individuals could cause severe problems in providing the data to the ERP system. Further, this process must be worked through completely to create a custom interface for each set of data to be provided to the ERP system.        
For the reasons stated above, and for other reasons stated below which will become apparent to those skilled in the art upon reading and understanding the present specification, there is a need in the art for an improved interface for enterprise resource planning programs.